Posted by: Lauren Young on March 26, 2009

Today’s lead story on BusinessWeek.com focuses on the stock market rally: equities are up 20% since the low.

But what about real estate, which dragged us into this mess in the first place? Are we near a bottom yet?

Keith Gumbinger (pictured right), mortgage guru at HSH, thinks a bottom is in sight. He points to home sales, which seem to be stabilizing. The Commerce Department said earlier this week new home sales rose 4.7% in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 337,000 from an upwardly revised January figure of 322,000.

“For anyone looking for signs of the market bottoming, at the very least, the housing numbers for February show we’ve seen some lift for sales of new as well as existing homes,” Gumbinger says. “A change in pattern is a change in pattern. At least the early inking is that the pattern of decline has come to a halt.”

What other signs do you see to show that real estate is (or isn’t) bottoming out?

Reader Comments

Not intended to be rude...but ...

March 26, 2009 3:25 PM

The best sign is :

A cautionary tale from the future.

It was published on September 25th 2008

No prizes for guessing the newspaper.

The best passage is : " It drove us out of business," recalled George Soros, a former hedge-fund manager, speaking in Central Park yesterday , before adding , " Do you want some ketchup with that?"

Quintessential , really!

And by the way , June 18th 2005

After the fall , remember ?

... and quite a fall it has been ...

Matt

April 8, 2009 3:48 PM

Post a comment

Name

Email

Comment

About

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ben Steverman focuses on the latest moves in financial markets and emerging trends in stocks, bonds, and funds, always with an eye toward giving readers a better understanding of the sometimes confusing and often chaotic world of money.
Standard & Poor’s senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt will also provide his take on companies’ finances and the markets. Voted one of the “Top 100 Finance Blogs” in 2007.